Director – Lucio Fulcis, Screenplay – Lucio Fulci & John Fitzsimmons with Collaboration of Antonio Tentori, Producers – Anthony Clear & Luigi Nannerini, Photography – Alessandro Grossi, Music – Fabio Frizzi. Production Company – Executive Cine TV srl.
Cast
Lucio Fulci (Dr. Lucio Fulci), David L. Thompson (Professor Egon Schwartz), Malisa Longo (Katya Schwarz), Brett Halsey (The Monster), Ria de Simon (The Soprano), Robert Egon (The Second Monster)
Plot
The famous horror director Lucio Fulci is suffering a series of vivid flashbacks and hallucinations about the things he directs in his films, seeing gore, acts of violence, orgies and bizarre deaths everywhere he turns. He goes to visit the psychiatrist Professor Egon Schwartz seeking answers and allows Schwarz to place him under hypnosis. However, Schwarz is a psychopath and uses the opportunity to instil a series of commands in Fulci’s mind, driving him to conduct acts of violence on his signal.
Italian director Lucio Fulci (1927-96) attained a brief cult following during the 1980s. During the period 1979-81, Fulci made a series of films that include Zombie – Flesh Eaters (1979), City of the Living Dead/The Gates of Hell (1980), The Beyond (1981) and The House By the Cemetery (1981). These usually feature zombies in some form and were premised principally around the provision of gory and way-out murders, various surreal happenings and not much else, least of all any plot holding them together. Fulci’s subsequent films up until his death in 1996 are much less interesting, largely because the outré gore was watered down. (See bottom of page for a full listing of Lucio Fulci’s other genre films).
A Cat in the Brain, released as Nightmare Concert in the US despite featuring no concerts, is a real oddity in Fulci’s oeuvre. Fulci had made cameos and played small roles in his other films, but this is the only film in which he played the lead role. Moreover, he is playing a character that is a thinly disguised version of himself (albeit with the title Dr appended to his name) as a horror director.
What then are we to make of the central plot where Fulci has the film version of himself unable to tell the difference between reality and his films and to be having violent flashbacks at every turn (which are abetted by a sinister psychologist) and even maybe killing people? The fictional Fulci wryly justifies what he does by saying at one point “If I made a romance, nobody would come.” The appealing fadeout of the film has Fulci sailing off in the yacht Perversion (Fulci’s own yacht) with the hot model while disappearing down into the cabin with a knife.
Lucio Fulci plays himself, a horror director tormented by his work(l to r) Lucio Fulci and sinister psychiatrist David L. Thompson
Much of A Cat in the Brain consists of extreme gore scenes. The opening credits play out as a literalisation of the title with a cat eating pieces of splattered brain. We then see a man sitting down to eat a steak carved from the thigh of a woman’s corpse and then chainsawing her body up and placing it into a meat grinder to feed to his pigs. Elsewhere we get a variety of throat slittings, meltdowns, see a woman’s tongue ripped out, a chainsaw decapitation, a man’s head repeatedly run over, and a scene where a woman at the docks has a hook impaled in her stomach and her guts torn out. Aside from gore scenes, there’s also an orgy scene taken from the shooting of a Nazisploitation film.
Not unexpectedly, all of this ended up creating considerable Censorship Controversies around the world – even the YouTube videos of the trailer have to be blurred out. I watched the uncut version of the film that runs to 97 minutes long, but this was cut in most countries on its initial release. In fact, the German version of A Cat in the Brain ended up only being 67 minutes long ie. had an entire twenty minutes of material cut out of it. The uncut version was not seen until 2001.
The strange thing about this is that most of the gore material is taken from other Fulci films and it would appear that little new material was actually shot for the film. Scenes are taken from other Fulci films including The Ghosts of Sodom (1988), Touch of Death/When Alice Broke the Mirror (1988) and Hansel and Gretel (1990), as well as works from other directors including the gialloBloody Psycho (1989) and Massacre (1989). In other words, what we have is really no more than a compilation film made up of clips from other films.
